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Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2, 225-249.

THE PARIAN MARBLE AND OTHER SURPRISES

FROM CHRONOLOGIST V. COUCKE

Ro d g e R C. Yo u n g

St. Louis, Missouri

I. Coucke’s Work as a Surprise to Thiele

For those who study the history and chronology of the Hebrew kingdom

period, the name of V. Coucke is usually only known from a footnote in

Edwin Thiele’s Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings. In the footnote, Thiele

acknowledged Coucke’s work as follows:

The author is happy to call attention to the existence of a number

of striking parallels between the details of his chronological

scheme and that of Prof. V. Coucke of the Grand Seminaire de

Bruges. . . . Not until the author had worked out the details of

his chronological scheme and the resultant dates for the kings

of Israel and Judah, did he become aware of the earlier work

of Professor Coucke. It is a matter of gratication to know that

these two independent studies have produced essentially the

same results on a number of important points, such as Tishri-

to-Tishri regnal years in Judah and Nisan-to-Nisan years in Israel

(though Professor Coucke suggests that in the latter instance this

might have been 1 Thoth instead of Nisan), and accession-year

reckoning in Judah except for a period when a shift was made to

the nonaccession-year system, and nonaccession-year reckoning

in Israel with a later shift to the accession-year system.

Coucke and Thiele both recognized Judah’s change to nonaccession

reckoning in the ninth century b.C., although Coucke thought that the change

started in the reign of Athaliah, while Thiele placed it a few years earlier in the

reign of Jehoram. Both scholars concluded that Judah, after a few years, went

back to accession reckoning, and eventually Israel also adopted this method.

Although they differed in some of the details, their general agreement on the

principles that governed the chronological methods of the authors of Kings

and Chronicles, arrived at independently, is evidence in favor of the overall

soundness of their respective approaches. One other principle discovered by

these scholars in addition to those already mentioned was the counting of some

Edwin Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan/Kregel, 1983), 59, n. 17. Earlier editions of Mysterious Numbers were

published in 1951 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and 1965 (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans). Unless otherwise noted, page numbers cited in this article refer to the

third edition. The works of Coucke are found in V. Coucke, “Chronologie des rois de

Juda et d’Israël,” RBén 37 (1925): 325-364, and “Chronologie biblique” in Supplément

au Dictionnaire de la Bible, ed. Louis Pirot, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1928),

cols. 1245-1279.

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Se m i n a R Y St u d i e S 48 (au t u m n 2010)

regnal years according to coregencies, whether these coregencies are explicitly

stated or implied. No subsequent study that ignores these basic principles has

had the success in matching new inscriptional evidence when it appears as have

the studies built on the foundation laid down by Coucke and Thiele.

Thiele apparently was rst informed of the work of Coucke by Siegfried

Horn. Horn had begun his own study of the chronology of the kingdom

period during his student days before World War II. In his investigations of the

literature, Horn related that “[t]he most striking contribution in this eld of

study seemed to me the work of Professor V. Coucke of the Grand Séminaire

de Bruges which appeared in 1925 in the form of an article in the Revue

Bénédictine, and in an expanded form was republished in 1928 in Volume I of

the Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible.”

Because of his German nationality,

Horn was detained in Indonesia and later in India by the British during the

war, during which time he had the leisure to develop his own ideas, inuenced

as they were by Coucke. He was not aware of the work of Thiele until he

came to America in 1946, which was two years after Thiele had published an

abridgment of the results of his doctoral dissertation. Horn then relates that

“to my utter amazement I found my chronological scheme to be in almost

complete agreement with that of Thiele.”

If Horn was amazed, then surely

Thiele was also, and not just because of the many agreements between his

work and that of Horn, but also because of the “striking parallels” that Horn

introduced him to in the work of Coucke.

I had made some attempt, without success, to obtain Coucke’s article in the

Supplément, so that a comparison could be made between Thiele’s chronology

and that of Coucke. Then in the fall of 2009, Andrew Steinmann found a copy

of the Supplément in the Wheaton College library, from which he duplicated

Coucke’s entry and shared it with me. We found that Coucke’s chronology

required more emendations of the text as compared to Thiele’s system, and so

Thiele’s work should still be considered as the starting place for subsequent work

in this eld. At the same time we found several unanticipated and interesting

ideas in Coucke’s writing. These ideas form the subject of the present paper.

II. A Welcome Surprise: Coucke’s Notation

In his article in the Supplément, and also in his earlier article in the Revue

Bénédictine, Coucke presented his chronology for the kings of Judah and Israel in

tabular form. Two tables, one for each kingdom, start on the third page of the

Supplément article. In both publications the tables contain a welcome innovation,

In support of this statement, see Kenneth A. Strand, “Thiele’s Biblical

Chronology As a Corrective for Extrabiblical Dates,” AUSS 34 (1996): 295-317.

Siegfried Horn, “The Chronology of King Hezekiah’s Reign,” AUSS 2 (1964):

41. Horn was the founding editor of AUSS.

Ibid., 45.

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

namely, a notation that shows at a glance whether the years assigned to the king

are determined according to Israel’s Nisan-based year or Judah’s Tishri-based

year. To designate the year that began in Nisan of 931 b.C., Coucke wrote “n.

931.” For a year that began in Tishri of the same year he wrote “t. 931.” The

six-month offset between the calendars used by the two kingdoms frequently

allows narrowing the synchronisms between them to a six-month period, which

could start in either Nisan or Tishri. Coucke wrote the rst of these periods as

“n. 931-t. 931,” the second as “t. 931-n. 930.” The rst expression designates a

period of time starting on Nisan 1 of 931 b.C. and ending the day before Tishri

1 of the same b.C. year. The second expression designates the time from Tishri

1 of 931 b.C. to the day before Nisan 1 of 930 b.C.

It is regrettable that Thiele did not see the need for a similar type of notation,

and equally regrettable that, after he was introduced to Coucke’s writings, he did

not adopt Coucke’s convention for his future work. As it was, Thiele continued

to use the inexact “931/30 b.C.” expressions in his writing. Does this term mean

a year by the northern kingdom’s calendar that started in Nisan of 931, or a

Judean-type year starting in Tishri? Or does it mean that the author is uncertain

of the date, and whatever is being referred to could have happened at any time

from January 1, 931 b.C. to December 31, 930 b.C.? Thiele’s notational system

became even more inexact in the third edition of Mysterious Numbers, where he

wrote: “In the interests of simplicity the date 930 is being used for the division

of the kingdom instead of the dual symbol 931/30.”

It can be argued whether or not this “simplication” made things easier

for the reader. It did nothing to clarify the ambiguity of the original system.

That ambiguity has led to confusion, especially to anyone who wanted to look

more carefully at the chronology of a given event. This was true for Thiele

himself. In the rst and second editions of Mysterious Numbers, Thiele had

Jehoshaphat starting a coregency with his father Asa in 873/72 b.C., with his

sole reign extending from 870/69 to 848 b.C. Thiele stated that the reason for

the coregency was that Asa, in the thirty-ninth year of his reign, was stricken

with a severe disease from which he eventually died (2 Chron 16:12-13), and

so in that year he appointed his son as coregent.

Thiele had also derived the

starting year of the coregency by synchronizing the long reigns of Asa and

Jehoshaphat with the reigns of their contemporaries on the throne of Israel.

In the rst and second editions of Mysterious Numbers, Thiele expressed

Asa’s accession year as 911/10, his forty-rst and last year as 870/69, and the

start of the Asa/Jehoshaphat coregency in Asa’s thirty-ninth year as 873/72.

With an inexact notation like this, the casual reader may have surmised

that it really was just two years from the latter part of the thirty-ninth year

Mysterious Numbers, 79. The new system, however, coexisted along with the older

convention in the third edition.

Mysterious Numbers, 2d ed., 70; 3d ed., 97.

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(873/72) to the rst part of the forty-rst year (870/69). An exact notation,

however, shows it does not work. The years intended started in Tishri of

873 and Tishri of 870 b.C., respectively, and the rst of these was Asa’s

thirty-eighth year, not his thirty-ninth as Thiele had it. Thiele eventually

became aware of the problem (perhaps a colleague pointed it out), and

so in his third edition he moved the beginning of the Asa/Jehoshaphat

coregency one year later, to 872/71. At least this change would make the

coregency start in the thirty-ninth year of Asa. But the move had a ripple

effect: Jehoshaphat’s twenty-ve years, or twenty-four full years when taking

into consideration the nonaccession reckoning usually used for coregencies,

now ended in 848/47 instead of in 849/48 as in the previous editions. The

ripple effect had to continue, so that Thiele’s third edition moved the reigns

of Jehoshaphat’s successors, Jehoram, Ahaziah, and Athaliah, all down one

year as compared to the previous editions. This change between editions

is not mentioned in the text. It is almost completely obscured by Thiele’s

ambiguous notation. Thus the tables of the second and third editions both

display Jehoram’s sole reign as beginning in 848, but in the second edition

(chart, 67) the more exact date is seen as starting in Tishri of 849, whereas

in the third edition (chart, 97), the starting date is Tishri of 848. In the third

edition, Ahaziah’s one year of reign moves down from the year beginning

in Tishri of 842 to the year beginning in Tishri of 841. Athaliah’s seven

years, which Thiele properly takes in a nonaccession sense (compare 2 Kgs

11:3 and 4) should then start in Ahaziah’s ending (and starting) year, the

year beginning in Tishri of 841, and end six years later in the year starting

in Tishri of 835 b.C. However, this date is not compatible with Thiele’s

accession year for Joash, which the third edition starts in Tishri of 836,

The length of reign of a coregency is more often than not according to

nonaccession reckoning, perhaps because the reigning king would have taken the

start of a new year of his reign as the appropriate occasion for installing his son as

the heir-apparent. This convention is to be used for the lengths of reign of Jotham

and Jehoshaphat. The years of Ahaz, however, as measured from his coregency with

Jotham, are measured in an accession sense. For a discussion of this anomaly for

Ahaz, see Rodger C. Young, “When Was Samaria Captured? The Need for Precision

in Biblical Chronologies,” JETS 47 (2004): 588.

Mysterious Numbers, 3d ed., chart on p. 101. The chart here shows Athaliah’s reign

as taking parts of only six calendar years, instead of the seven calendar years (six full

years plus part of one year) that are required if she is to have six accession or seven

nonaccession years. If the chart had shown Athaliah’s years in both an accession sense

and a nonaccession sense, as is done for the years of Joram of Israel immediately below

in the same chart, the problem may have been noticed. As it is, this is an example of how

these kinds of charts, no matter how elaborate, can be quite useless for the ne points

of chronology, because most readers apparently did not recognize the basic aw just

described. If Thiele had used an exact notation in expressing his years of reign, the aw

should have become evident before his nished chronology was published.

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

that is, one year before the death of Athaliah, whom Joash succeeded on

the throne. Thiele could not move Joash and the subsequent kings of Judah

down one year because this would have caused conict in the synchronisms

with Jehu and his successors on the throne of Israel, whose dates are tied

to Assyrian dates, and so we are left with a fundamental inconsistency in

Thiele’s dates for these early kings of Judah.

Even though I have discussed Thiele’s discrepancies for the reigns of

Jehoshaphat through Athaliah in previous publications, I have repeated the

discussion here for two reasons. The rst reason is to illustrate that Thiele’s

predicament could have been avoided if he had, like Coucke, adopted an

exact notation that would clear up all confusion about the kind of year

being discussed and then applied the appropriate arithmetic that should be

used with that year. In the rst two editions of Mysterious Numbers, if Asa’s

nal year was written in Coucke’s notation as “t. 870” instead of as 870/69,

and the year in which Jehoshaphat became his coregent as “t. 873” instead

of as 873/72, it would have been obvious that Thiele’s year for the start of

the coregency was three years before the death of Asa, not the two years

that he said were compatible with the coregency starting in Asa’s thirty-

ninth year. From personal experience, I can also say that it was easier to nd

Thiele’s errors in his “corrections” of the third edition when I used an exact

notation for the reigns of the monarchs, as compared to trying to reconcile

Thiele’s charts. Had Thiele written out things in an exact notation, his small

arithmetic errors would not have remained obscured as long as they did. If

Thiele, then, whom we readily acknowledge as the groundbreaking authority

for the chronology of the kingdom period, was confused because he did

not adopt a precise notation for his work, is it not clear that persevering in

ambiguous notation schemes will continue to produce confusion?

Coucke saw that a well-dened, exact notation was a requirement for

serious chronological study. Thiele learned of Coucke’s work fairly early in

his career, and if he had adopted Coucke’s notation at that time, then by

means of Thiele’s subsequent writings, and the increasing recognition they

received, he could have established an effective notation like this long ago.

it is, more than eighty years have passed since Coucke wrote his two treatises,

and we still do not have any general agreement on the notational system to

be used when writing in this eld except for the old imprecise 931/30 b.C.

convention. As compared with the methods and conventions for the strict

denition of terms adopted by any of the exact sciences, this situation for

chronological research is deplorable.

If a writer did not agree that Judah’s years began in Tishri, and Israel’s in Nisan,

but that all calendars are to be dated from Heshvan, he or she could write years as

931h and the meaning of the author would be clear, no matter how unreasonable the

reader might think it is to start anything in Heshvan.

230

Se m i n a R Y St u d i e S 48 (au t u m n 2010)

The second reason for going into detail on this small matter of a one-

year discrepancy in Thiele’s chronology is to mention that once the problem

is understood, another solution can be explored: keep the start of the

Asa/Jehoshaphat coregency where it was in the rst and second editions

(873/72), but move the years for Asa and his predecessors on the throne

of Judah back one year. This produces harmony in all the reign lengths and

synchronisms of the two kingdoms for the time from Solomon through

Athaliah. It does away with Thiele’s awkward supposition that the scribes

of the two kingdoms superimposed their own method of accession years

or nonaccession years on dates from the other kingdom, even though in all

other respects they properly observed the system of the other kingdom.

A further consequence, one with signicant theological implications, is that

it puts the calendar of Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles in agreement with the

regnal dates of Solomon, in particular with the date when the foundation

of the Temple was laid.

Anyone with a technical background who sets out to study the profuse

and complex chronological data of the Hebrew kingdom period should soon

recognize the need for the use of an exact notation in expressing the basic

building blocks of the trade, namely Israel’s Nisan-based year and Judah’s

Tishri-based year. When I began to write in this eld in 2003, I made the

rather obvious choice of attaching an “n” to the b.C. date to represent Nisan

years or a “t” to represent Tishri years. Should these letters be capitalized

or lower case? I decided on the latter as less likely to detract from the more

important of the two expressions, the b.C. year. My choice for six-month

intervals was 931n/931t and 931t/930n. The reader will notice the similarity

of these expressions to those introduced by Coucke.

Daiqing Yuan saw this need when writing his Th.M. thesis at Dallas

Theological Seminary.

Daiqing already had a Ph.D. in physics, and so he

knew that terms must be dened exactly, and all ambiguities cleared up,

before presenting the results of any technical research. The convention he

derived is shown in Table 1, along with those of Coucke and myself, in order

For the details, see Rodger C. Young, “When Did Solomon Die?” JETS 46

(2003): 589–603.

Rodger C. Young, “Ezekiel 40:1 As a Corrective for Seven Wrong Ideas in

Biblical Interpretation,” AUSS 44 (2006): 277–281; idem, “The Talmud’s Two Jubilees

and Their Relevance to the Date of the Exodus,” WTJ 68 (2006): 71-83; idem, “Three

Verications of Thiele’s Date for the Beginning of the Divided Kingdom,” AUSS 45

(2007): 173-179; idem, “Evidence for Inerrancy from a Second Unexpected Source:

The Jubilee and Sabbatical Cycles,” Bible and Spade 21 (2008): 109-122; idem, with

Bryant Wood, “A Critical Analysis of the Evidence from Ralph Hawkins for a Late-

Date Exodus-Conquest,” JETS 51 (2008): 234-239.

Daiqing Yuan, “A Proposed Chronology for Judges” (Th.M. thesis, Dallas

Theological Seminary, 2006).

231

th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

to display their essential similarity. Coucke’s notation for a year takes two

extra characters, a space and a period, or two spaces and two periods extra

for the six-month representation, so it is the least compact of the three. The

method of expressing the year in all three conventions is simple enough that

any reader who understands that ancient calendars did not all start on January

1 should quickly adapt to this usage.

13,

14,

TABLE 1. FORMS OF THE NISAN/TISHRI NOTATION FOR THE

YEAR 931 b.c., DEVELOPED INDEPENDENTLY

BY THREE AUTHORS

Coucke Young Yuan

Year beginning Nisan 1 n. 931 931n 931N

Year beginning Tishri 1 t. 931 931t 931T

6 months beginning Nisan 1 n. 931-t. 931 931n/931t N-T931

6 months beginning Tishri 1 t. 931-n. 930 931t/930n T931-N930

For the six-month periods, however, the expression is less intuitive.

931n/931t means the period starting on Nisan 1 of 931 b.C., which is clear

enough, but the second expression means that this period ends the day before

Tishri 1 of the same b.C. year, and so its meaning is not so self-evident. In

discussing this with Yuan, we agreed that the six-month period (ignoring

intercalary months) might be written as 931n with a subscript 6, i.e., 931n

but for the present there are no plans to adopt this modication.

The three Nisan/Tishri conventions were instituted independently

by writers who saw the need for an unambiguous way of expressing time

periods. Although Coucke published his articles in 1925 and 1928, I had not

read any of his writings until late 2009, by which time I had published several

articles using the Nisan/Tishri notation, the rst article appearing in 2003.

When Yuan nished his Th.M. thesis in 2006, he had not seen my articles, so

that this represents three writers who independently saw this need, and who

independently came up with similar conventions to meet the need. There is

no question, then, that there is a requirement for a better way of expressing

dates than is currently found in most of the literature. How many times does

the wheel need to be reinvented before it starts to roll?

Coucke’s notation is explained at the bottom of the tables in his “Chronologie”

and Supplément articles.

Young, “When Did Solomon Die?” 590-591, but the notation is explained more

fully in idem, “When Was Samaria Captured?” 580.

Yuan, v.

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Se m i n a R Y St u d i e S 48 (au t u m n 2010)

There is some hope on the horizon. In 2010 or 2011, Steinmann plans

to publish his book on the biblical chronology from Abraham to Paul.

For

the kingdom period, he will use the Nisan/Tishri notation in the form that I

have advocated. This is also the form that will be used in discussing some ne

points of chronology in the rest of this article.

III. Third Surprise: Coucke’s Use of

the Parian Marble to Date Solomon

Coucke was aware of the Assyrian inscription that mentioned Ahab as one

of the foes of Shalmaneser III at the Battle of Qarqar, but he used it only

as a general checkpoint, not as the starting point for assigning absolute dates

to his chronology. His date for the battle, 854 b.C., was in keeping with the

majority consensus of scholarship in his time. It was Thiele who was largely

instrumental in modifying this to the date that is now almost universally

accepted, 853 b.C.,

although, as Thiele acknowledges, Emil Forrer and other

scholars had previously advocated this date.

Coucke had Ahab’s death in

853n, the year after his date for the Battle of Qarqar, but he was unable to

use it as a xed point for his chronology because he failed to appreciate, as

did Thiele, that the twelve years between the battle in Shalmaneser’s sixth year,

at which Ahab was present, and the tribute from Jehu that the Assyrian king

received in his eighteenth year required that the rst of these events was in

Ahab’s last year and the second in Jehu’s rst year. The reigns of Ahab’s two

successors, Ahaziah and Joram, then t into the twelve intervening years. Not

understanding this, Coucke instead chose to believe that the scriptural texts

were in error, and so assigned seven years to Israel’s Joram instead of the

twelve years given him in 2 Kgs 3:1. The uncertainties in these speculations

meant that the Battle of Qarqar could not be used as a denitive anchor point

to tie the reign lengths of the Hebrew kings to absolute (b.C.) dates, and he

looked for some other date from antiquity to be used for this purpose. He was

able to determine such a point in the reign of Solomon by combining three

ancient sources: the state records of Tyre as recorded in Josephus, the writings

of the Roman historian Pompeius Trogus as condensed in Justin’s Epitome of

Trogus’s writings, and the chronological data found in the Parian Marble.

Coucke’s use of the Parian Marble and these other sources to date

Solomon is the most surprising element in all of his writings. It is apparently

unique in studies of the chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period, and yet

Coucke introduces it in a matter-of-fact way, as follows: “The rst year of the

construction of this edice [Solomon’s Temple] is determined in this way:

Andrew E. Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (St. Louis:

Concordia, forthcoming).

Mysterious Numbers, 67-78.

Ibid., 73.

233

th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

According to the Parian Marble, the capture of Troy was in the month of May

1207 b.C.; Tyre was founded a year earlier. . . .”

Marble from the Greek island of Paros was prized in antiquity for its

quality. It was used in making some of the most famous sculptures from

the classical era. The term “Parian marble” can refer either to this marble,

as excavated from Paros, or, with a capital “M,” to a marble tablet that was

originally located on the island, two fragments of which were brought to

England in a.d. 1627. This tablet is also called the Parian Chronicle, or (Latin)

the Marmor Parium. The smaller of the two fragments was lost in the English

Civil War, but not before a transcription and translation had been made. The

major fragment was presented to Oxford University in 1667, and it is now one

of the foremost treasures of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. A shorter third

fragment was found in 1897 on Paros itself and now resides in a museum

on the island. The full text of the three portions, along with an interlinear

translation into English, is found on the Ashmolean’s website.

The tablet is

a chronological list that dates various events in the histories of Greece and

other nations, starting with 1582/81 b.C. and ending with the year that began,

according to the Macedonian calendar, in the fall of 264 b.C., i.e., 264/63 b.C.

Since the Macedonian calendar used the same lunar month for the start of the

year as did the Judean calendar, where the month name was Tishri, the basis

for calculations using the Parian Marble may conveniently be written as 264t.

Every event listed in the chronology is related to this date, which is therefore

assumed to be the date of composition.

Coucke cited the Parian Marble in order to date the fall of Troy to 1207

b.C. as his rst step in establishing the dates of Solomon’s reign. A one-year

correction should be made to this. The Parian Marble, entry 24, states that

Troy was captured in the month of Thargelion (roughly May), and from the

capture to the Marble’s base date was 945 years. This would put the fall of

Troy in (264t + 945) = 1209t, and more specically in the late spring of 1208

b.C. Coucke either used inclusive numbering for the 945 years or took the base

year of the Marble as 263t instead of 264t, and so derived 1207 b.C., instead

of 1208. In what follows, the fall of Troy will be dated to the spring of 1208

b.C., the interpretation of the text that is taken on the Ashmolean website.

Coucke then cited Pompeius Trogus/Justin 18:3.5 as saying that Tyre

was founded the year before the fall of Troy, that is, in the year 1210t when

making the one-year correction that was just mentioned. However, there is

a complication here. Trogus may have been using the Roman calendar as

the basis for his statement. Before 153 b.C., the Roman calendar year started

Supplément, col. 1251.

Ashmolean Museum (<www.ashmolean.org/ash/faqs/q004/q004006.html>,

accessed 13 October 2010).

234

Se m i n a R Y St u d i e S 48 (au t u m n 2010)

on March 1,

so that the year before the fall of Troy in May of 1208 b.C. in

the Roman system would be the year extending from March 1, 1209 b.C., to

the last day of February 1208. Assuming, with Coucke, that the Phoenician

calendar year was from Tishri to Tishri,

the founding of Tyre could have

been in either the latter part of 1210t or the rst part of 1209t, and it still

would have been in the year prior to the fall of Troy, according to the Roman

March-based calendar. We therefore have two possible years to consider for

the founding or Tyre, 1210t or 1209t, whereas Coucke only allowed for one

year.

This would not be the original founding of Tyre, since there exists

correspondence between Abu-Milki, king of Tyre, and the pharaoh of Egypt

in the Amarna period, about 130 years prior to 1210t. The passage in Pompeius

Trogus (18:3:5) cited by Coucke relates that the Phoenicians had been defeated

by the king of Ascalon, “after which they took to their ships and founded the

city of Tyre the year before the fall of Troy.” Ascalon, more commonly written

as Ashkelon, was a Philistine city, and Jacob Katzenstein

and W. F. Albright

relate this refounding of Tyre to the displacements caused by the invasion of

the Sea Peoples about the time of Pharaoh Merneptah. Current scholarship

identies the Philistines as part of this Sea Peoples invasion.

The modern

dating of the rst Sea Peoples invasion to the short reign of Merneptah (ca.

1213–ca. 1203 b.C.) is in agreement with the statement of Pompeius Trogus that

Tyre was founded the year before the capture of Troy, while at the same time it

gives credibility to the Parian Marble’s date of 1208 b.C. for the latter event.

Having calculated a year for the founding of Tyre, Coucke cited Ant.

VIII.3.1/62, where Josephus refers to the court records of Tyre that mention

Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,

1998), 66.

Coucke explains why he assumes Tishri-based years for Judah in the Chronologie

article, 327. Later, Thiele used 1 Kgs 6:37-38 and 2 Kgs 22:3–23:23 to show that

Judah had a Tishri-based calendar (Mysterious Numbers, 51-52). Coucke remarks that

three month-names used in the times of Solomon—Ziv (1 Kgs 6:1, 37), Bul (1 Kgs

6:38), and Ethanim (1 Kgs 8:2)—are found in Phoenician inscriptions, and so these

are Phoenician month-names. He then infers that since the two kingdoms had the

same month-names, Tyre’s calendar would have the same starting month as was used

in Judah.

H. Jacob Katzenstein, The History of Tyre from the Second Millennium b.c.e until

the Fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 538 b.c.e. (Jerusalem: Goldberg’s Press, 1973),

59-61.

W. F. Albright, “The Role of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization,” in

G. E. Wright, ed., The Bible and the Ancient Near East (New York: Doubleday, 1961),

340.

The Philistines in the time of Abraham and Isaac (Gen 21:34, 26:1) may have

been of this same ethnic stock, but representatives of an earlier migration.

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the assistance given to Solomon by Hiram, king of Tyre, at the beginning of

the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. These records date Hiram’s

assistance as taking place in the eleventh year of his reign, which was also 240

years after the founding of Tyre. Josephus elsewhere (Ag. Ap. I.18/126) says

that Hiram’s assistance began in his twelfth year of reign, so Coucke allowed

that this gave an alternate gure of 241 years after the founding of Tyre to the

start of construction of Solomon’s Temple. Using the two possible years for

the founding of Tyre calculated above and the two periods of elapsed time

postulated by Coucke, the construction of the Temple could have started in

(1210t – 240) = 970t, (1210t – 241) = 969t, (1209t – 240) = 969t, or (1209t

– 241) = 968t. Coucke’s original calculation, which did not consider a Roman

calendar, gave only 969t and 968t. By his use of the Tyrian King List (see next

section), Coucke ruled out the rst of these possibilities, and this would also

rule out the 970t option. He thus settled on 968t as his xed date from which to

start his construction of the chronology of the Hebrew kings.

There are some remarkable concepts in all this. The rst is that nothing

in Coucke’s reasoning is based on a biblical text. Everything is derived from

classical authors. Only after he derived the date of the start of construction of

Solomon’s Temple from these sources did he refer to 1 Kgs 6:1 and 11:42 to say

that since Temple construction began in Solomon’s fourth year and he reigned

forty years, therefore Solomon died in 932t. This is the year for the death of

Solomon that I derived in my “Solomon” paper,

without any knowledge of

Coucke’s reasoning. Coucke then placed the division of the kingdom in 931n,

which is the same year for the division of the kingdom that Thiele derived

by working with the biblical data, as tied to the 853 b.C. date for the Battle of

Qarqar. There has been no need to change this date since Thiele rst published

it in 1944.

It is therefore noteworthy that the dates of Solomon, which can

be established with precision from the biblical and Assyrian data, agree so

exactly with the date derived from Coucke’s classical sources. The importance

of this is not that the classical sources give credibility to the biblical data, but

the other way around: the biblical data give credibility to the classical sources.

In particular, they are evidence in favor of the factuality of (1) the dating of the

fall of Troy to 1208 b.C. by the Parian Marble, (2) the statement of Pompeius

Trogus that Tyre was founded the year before Troy fell, and (3) the 240 years

from the founding of Tyre to the building of Solomon’s Temple that Josephus

derived from Tyrian court records.

These conclusions are controversial in their implications for the world

of classical scholarship. In particular, the date for the fall of Troy that is

usually derived from Greek authors is 1183 b.C., not the 1208 b.C. of the

Young, “When Did Solomon Die?” 589-603.

Edwin R. Thiele, “The Chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel,” JNES

3 (1944): 137-186.

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Parian Marble. Any study therefore that seeks to establish the Parian Marble’s

date over the commonly accepted date needs to consider the question of

the Parian Marble’s overall trustworthiness. Sources such as the Canons of

Eusebius that are used to justify the 1183 date should also be examined for

their credibility. The issues involved are somewhat complex, and the fuller

discussion that they require has been relegated to a separate article.

For the

present study, what is important to emphasize is that Coucke’s derivation of

the date when construction began on Solomon’s Temple is entirely innovative.

It relies on sources and basic data that no other scholar has put together when

seeking to determine xed dates in the chronology of the books of Kings and

Chronicles. And its exactness in matching the dates for Solomon that can be

independently derived from the biblical and Assyrian data argues strongly for

the soundness of his reasoning.

IV. Coucke’s Use of the Tyrian King List:

A Surprise to Later Scholars

In 1953, J. Liver argued that an Assyrian inscription that was published in

1951 showed that Pompeius Trogus’s date for the founding of Carthage,

825 b.C., was to be preferred to the date of 814 b.C. given in other classical

sources.

Connecting this with the Tyrian King List in Josephus (Ag. Ap.

I.17/108; I.18/117–126) that placed the start of work on Solomon’s Temple

143 years before the founding of Carthage, he derived 968/67 b.C. as the date

for the founding of the Temple. In 1972, F. M. Cross did a textual analysis

of the names and lengths of reigns in the Tyrian King List from Hiram,

contemporary of Solomon, to Pygmalion, whose sister Dido ed from Tyre

in Pygmalion’s seventh year of reign, after which she founded Carthage in

North Africa.

Cross’s textual analysis reinforced Liver’s previous research,

and he concluded that these extrabiblical sources showed that construction

began on the Jerusalem Temple in 968 b.C., in agreement with Liver’s date.

In 1991, William H. Barnes published the results of his Th.D. thesis

on the chronology of the Hebrew kingdom period, for which Cross was his

thesis advisor.

Barnes devoted twenty-seven pages of his book to a textual

study and critical analysis of the Tyrian King List, and found that the evidence

supporting the historical trustworthiness of the 143 years between the founding

Andrew E. Steinmann and Rodger C. Young, “The Parian Marble, the Tyrian

King List, and the Date of Construction of Solomon’s Temple,” forthcoming.

J. Liver, “The Chronology of Tyre at the Beginning of the First Millennium

b.C.,” IEJ 3 (1953):113-120.

Frank M. Cross Jr., “An Interpretation of the Nora Stone,” BASOR 208

(1972):17, n. 11.

William H. Barnes, Studies in the Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel, HSM

48 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991).

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

of the Temple and the founding of Carthage was strong, reinforcing 968 b.C.

as the date for the beginning of Temple construction. Barnes stated that for

this date, “[a] variation of a year or two is possible, of course, especially in the

light of our ignorance of Phoenician dating practices, but I seriously doubt

that an error of more than two years either way is likely.”

I surveyed the work of these scholars in a 2007 article in Seminary Studies.

Neither I nor the three authors just mentioned were aware of Coucke’s study

of the Tyrian King List. Coucke’s conclusions were therefore independent

of those of the later writers, yet everyone involved derived the same date for

the beginning of Temple construction. In my article, the agreement of the

studies of Liver, Cross, and Barnes on the date when construction began on

Solomon’s Temple was presented as the last of three major evidences for the

factuality of Thiele’s date for the division of the kingdom after the death of

Solomon. The rst line of evidence given for the correctness of Thiele’s date

was the internal and external consistency of the reasoning that was used to

derive it. The second line of evidence was the exact agreement of this date

with the related date for the beginning of construction on Solomon’s Temple,

as calculated from the chronology of the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles. The

paper demonstrated that these three lines of evidence are fundamentally

independent. The chronology for the division as derived by Thiele did not use,

and does not rely on, either the Tyrian King List or the calendar of Jubilee/

Sabbatical cycles. The Jubilee/Sabbatical calendar is shown as accurate by

its agreement with the chronological data in 1 Kgs 6:1, but it does not rely

on Thiele’s derivation of the date of the division of the kingdom or on the

Tyrian King List. The date for the foundation of the Temple as derived from

the Tyrian King List relies on no biblical texts, nor does it rely on the Jubilee/

Sabbatical cycles. The agreement of these three fundamentally independent

methods of chronological determination is sufcient to establish Thiele’s

date for the division of the kingdom, and the related date for the foundation

of Solomon’s Temple, as two of the most secure dates in the history of the

early rst millennium b.C.

Coucke used the Tyrian King List as follows. He allowed two possible dates

for the founding of Rome: 752 b.C., following Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or

753 b.C., following Varro. He then used the statement of Pompeius Trogus/

Justin (18.6.9) as saying that Carthage was founded seventy-two years before

the founding of Rome. His dates for the founding of Carthage were therefore

825 or 824 b.C. Coucke assumed that Tyre used Tishri-based years, so that

he used 825t and 824t for these dates. He did not explain why he preferred

Trogus’s date for the founding of Carthage over the 814 b.C. date given by

Ibid., 54.

Young, “Three Verications,” 179-187.

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Timaeus.

When combined with the span of 143 years of the Tyrian King

List from the foundation of Solomon’s Temple until the founding of Carthage

(or ight of Dido), this gave Coucke two possible dates, 968t or 967t for

the foundation of Solomon’s Temple. Only the rst of these agreed with

the dates of 969t and 968t he had derived when measuring downward 240

or 241 years from the founding of Tyre, so 968t was the year that Coucke

settled on for the foundation of Solomon’s Temple. Coucke’s treatment of

the Tyrian King List therefore arrived at the same conclusion, and exactly the

same date, as reached later by Liver, Cross, and Barnes, none of whom was

aware of Coucke’s earlier research. This agreement between Coucke and the

later scholars should be understood as strengthening this one leg of the three

supports of the chronology of Solomon’s reign, and hence, by extension, the

credibility of the other two methods.

Three independent methods of calculating the dates of Solomon are

more than sufcient. But Coucke gave us a fourth; this was the subject of the

preceding section, dealing with the calculation of the date for the founding of

the Temple based on the Parian Marble and citations from Pompeius Trogus

and Josephus. There was nothing in the calculation that started with the Parian

Marble that depended on the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles, the Tyrian King List,

or Thiele’s calculation of the date for the division of the kingdom as derived

from biblical and Assyrian texts. Coucke’s fourth method is independent of all

of these, yet its results are consistent with each of the other methods.

V. Fifth Surprise: Coucke’s Correct Date for

the Fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians

In the Supplément, Coucke started his chronological reckonings for the Hebrew

monarchies by determining from classical authors the date when construction

began on the Temple at Jerusalem. At the lower end of the monarchic period,

he determined a date for the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple

by recourse once again to an ancient literary work, in this case the Canon of

Ptolemy. His interest was to derive a date from the Canon for the accession year

of Amel-Marduk (biblical Evil-Merodach), the Babylonian king who released

from prison Jehoiachin, the next-to-the-last king of Judah. According to 2 Kgs

25:27 and Jer 52:31, Jehoiachin’s release was in his thirty-seventh year of captivity

and in the accession year (wOkl;mf tnA#$;bi@) of Amel-Marduk. Coucke’s plan was to

For a discussion of why there are two gures, 825 b.C. and 814 b.C., for the

founding of Carthage, see Young, “Three Verications,” 180, particularly n. 42 that

refers to J. M. Peñuela’s argument that several years elapsed between the time that

Dido ed Tyre until she and her companions founded Carthage. Peñuela maintains

that Dido left Tyre in 825 b.C., but she and her companions did not receive permission

from the indigenous residents of North Africa to found the city until 814 b.C. (“La

Inscripción Asiria IM 55644 y la Cronología de los Reyes de Tiro,” Sefarad 14 [1954]:

28-29 and nn. 164-167).

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

work backward from Jehoiachin’s release in order to date other events relative

to the years of captivity. There is a sufcient number of scriptural texts related

to Jehoiachin’s exile, and their meaning is clear enough, that Coucke’s procedure

provides a simple and legitimate means of determining the correct date for

the fall of Jerusalem, as long as Ptolemy’s date for the accession year of Amel-

Marduk can be rmly established, and as long as no unusual interpretations are

forced onto the biblical texts. From the Canon, Coucke determined that Amel-

Marduk’s accession year began on Nisan 1, 562 b.C.

This date has been veried by inscriptional evidence that shows that

Amel-Marduk’s reign began at some time in October of 562 b.C.

Jehoiachin

was released near the end of the twelfth month (Adar) of the Babylonian

king’s accession year (2 Kgs 25:27; Jer 52:31), that is, in the rst week of

April, 561 b.C. Jehoiachin’s thirty-seventh year of captivity is therefore well

established as 562n by Babylon’s Nisan-based years. If the biblical texts were

based on Tishri-based years, Jehoiachin’s release would be in 562t. Coucke

then looked to Ezek 33:21 to determine the year in which Jerusalem fell.

In this verse, Ezekiel states that he learned of the fall of Jerusalem on the

fth day of the tenth month of the twelfth year of “our exile,” meaning the

exile he shared with Jehoiachin (Ezek 1:2). Comparing this twelfth year with

the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin’s exile gives either (562n + 37 - 12) =

587n or (562t + 37 - 12) = 587t for the year in which Ezekiel learned of the

catastrophe. Whether Ezekiel was reckoning by Nisan years or by Tishri years,

the fth day of the tenth month was the same either way, i.e., January 19, 586

b.C.

This contradicts a fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 586 b.C. Coucke’s

only concern was whether the city fell in Tammuz (the fourth month, Jer

52:6) of 588 b.C. or Tammuz of 587. The former choice would have meant

that nineteen months had elapsed before the news of the fall reached the

exiles in Babylon,

an unreasonably long time compared to six months if

Coucke, Supplément, col. 1264.

Richard A. Parker and Waldo H. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 626 b.C.–

a.d. 75 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1956), 12. Julian dates in the following

discussion are taken from this resource.

Ibid., 28. Month numbering is always with Nisan as the rst month, even if the

years are reckoned from a starting point in Tishri, as explained by Thiele (Mysterious

Numbers, 52), and as accepted without explanation by Coucke (Supplément, col. 1251).

This well-known phenomenon means that months 7 through 12 of 587t would be the

same as months 7 through 12 of 587n, while months 1 through 6 of 587t would be

one year later than months 1 through 6 of 587n.

Coucke (Supplément, col. 1265) writes that sixteen or seventeen months would

have elapsed. However, according to Parker and Dubberstein, 28, the Babylonians

inserted an intercalary month on March 25 of 587 b.C., so that nineteen months passed

from the fourth month of 588 b.C. to the tenth month of the next calendar year. The

nineteen-month gure assumes that Judah, and specically Ezekiel, also recognized an

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Jerusalem fell in the summer of 587 b.C. Coucke therefore established 587 b.C.

as the year of Jerusalem’s fall.

Coucke’s method in this determination used a straightforward exegesis

of the scriptural texts involved. Furthermore, the method is in harmony

with Babylonian history, since Ptolemy’s date for the accession year of Amel-

Marduk has been veried by inscriptional evidence. A further verication of

the correctness of Coucke’s procedure came with D. J. Wiseman’s publication,

in 1956, of a Babylonian text from the time of Nebuchadnezzar that stated

that Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and its king on the second of Adar

in Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year.

This was March 16, 597 b.C. The captured

king was Jehoiachin, whom Nebuchadnezzar replaced by appointing as regent

Jehoiachin’s uncle, Zedekiah (2 Kgs 24:17). The date of the second of Adar in

Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year was therefore a verication of the accuracy of 2

Kgs 25:27 and Jer 52:31, from which the rst year of Jehoiachin’s captivity, and

therefore the accession year of Zedekiah, is calculated as either (562n + 36) =

598n or (562t + 36) = 598t. Both of these year-spans include Adar 2, 597 b.C.

Those who support a 586 date for the fall of Jerusalem, and who recognize

the problem that Ezek 33:21, coupled with 2 Kgs 25:27 and Jer 52:31, poses

for the 586 date, attempt to utilize other means of measuring the years of

captivity in order to give agreement with their chronology. Thus Thiele

postulated that Jehoiachin’s captivity or exile was not to be measured from

the date he was captured by Nebuchadnezzar’s forces, but from a supposed

start of the trip to Babylon in the next month, Nisan of 597 b.C. Thiele then

further supposed that Ezekiel’s years of exile are measured according to a

Nisan-based calendar.

In itself, it is not unreasonable that Ezekiel could have

used Nisan reckoning, because this was according to the calendar system of

Babylonia, where he lived, even though it would have been contrary to the

usual Tishri-based calendar used in Judah. With Thiele’s two presuppositions,

the twelfth year of exile mentioned in Ezek 33:21 would be (597n – 11) =

586n, and Ezekiel would have received news of the fall of the city on January

8, 585 b.C. This would place Jehoiachin’s release in the thirty-sixth year of his

captivity by Ezekiel’s (supposed) Nisan-based reckoning, but in the thirty-

seventh year by the Tishri-based reckoning of 2 Kgs 25:27 and Jer 52:31.

Another approach to this problem for those who hold to the 586 b.C.

date was offered by Gershon Galil.

In order to get Jehoiachin’s captivity

intercalary month during this time period. If not, the elapsed time would have been

eighteen months.

Donald J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldean Kings (625-556 b.C.) in the British

Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1956), 73.

Mysterious Numbers, 187.

Gershon Galil, “The Babylonian Calendar and the Chronology of the Last

Kings of Judah,” Bib 72 (1991): 373, 376.

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

to start in Nisan, so that the arithmetic would come out for the 586 date,

Galil proposed that although the Babylonian record dated the capture of

Jerusalem and Jehoiachin to the month Adar, it was really Nisan in the Judean

calendar because Galil presumed that Judah had not intercalated a month

in the previous year as the Babylonians did. Adar for the Babylonians was

therefore Nisan for the Judeans. The result is the same: Jehoiachin’s captivity

was assumed to start in Nisan, not in Adar as in the Babylonian record. Galil

also presumed, as Thiele did, that Nisan-type years were used by Ezekiel in

dating events according to the year of captivity.

Ezekiel 24:1-2 presents a problem for these assumptions of Thiele and

Galil. In these verses, the beginning of the nal siege of Jerusalem is dated

to the ninth year, tenth month, and tenth day. This should be compared

with 2 Kgs 25:1 and Jer 52:4, where the beginning of the siege is dated to

the ninth year, tenth month, and tenth day of Zedekiah’s reign. There are two

ways of reconciling these verses. One is to assume that this demonstrates

that Zedekiah’s reign was measured in 2 Kings by nonaccession reckoning,

the same as the years of exile of Jehoiachin. The Ezekiel passage is then

in obvious agreement with the Kings and Jeremiah passages, whereas if

Zedekiah’s reign is by accession years, there is disagreement. This passage is

glossed over by Thiele, who, although citing the texts related to the beginning

of the siege, does not mention the problem this presents to his assumption

that Zedekiah’s years were by accession reckoning.

Galil addressed the

problem by assuming that because the phrase “of the exile” was not present

in Ezek 24:1-2, Ezekiel switched his method of reckoning the years from the

years of exile of Jehoiachin to the years of Zedekiah’s reign, without giving

any indication to the reader of this change in the mode of reckoning.

Other texts in Ezekiel are difcult to reconcile with this interpretation of

Ezek 24:1-2. One of these is the revelation of Ezek 26:1-2, where Jerusalem’s

fall is spoken of as a past event. Neither Thiele (Mysterious Numbers) nor Galil

(Babylonian Calendar) mentions the chronological implications of this verse.

The revelation is dated to the eleventh year and the rst day of the month,

On p. 189 of Mysterious Numbers, Thiele writes: “On the tenth day of the tenth

month of the ninth year (15 Jan. 588), a solemn message came from God: ‘Son of

man, record this date, this very date, because the king of Babylon has laid siege to

Jerusalem this very date. . . . Woe to the city of bloodshed’ (Ezek. 24:1–2, 6). Thus on

the very day that the nal siege of Jerusalem began, the exiles in Babylon had word

of that event. ‘In the ninth year’ of Zedekiah, ‘on the tenth day of the tenth month,

Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army. He

encamped outside the city and built siege works all around it’ (2 Kings 25:1).” There is

no mention here of the disparity between nonaccession dates measured by the years

of captivity, which Thiele assumes elsewhere for Ezekiel, with the accession years that

he assumes for Zedekiah in the Kings and Jeremiah passages.

Galil, 370.

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with the month not specied. According to the hypotheses of either Thiele or

Galil that have Ezekiel reckoning the rst year of exile as 597n, the eleventh

year would be 587n. The latest possible date for the revelation would be the

rst day of the twelfth month of 587n, which was March 15, 586 b.C. This was

before, not after, Thiele’s and Galil’s date of July 18, 586 b.C., for the fall of

Jerusalem. In order to rescue their chronologies, the assumption would have

to be made that Ezekiel (or, according to the various fragmentary hypotheses,

Ezekiel’s editor) has again switched the method of reckoning, without

informing the reader, to accession years based on the reign of Zedekiah. The

eleventh year in Thiele’s system would then be 598t – 11 = 587t, and the

latest possible date for Ezekiel 26:1-2 would be rst day of the sixth month

(Elul) of 587t, which is September 7, 586 b.C. Galil’s chronology also requires

an unannounced switching of dates in Ezek 26:1-2, but his system differs

from that of Thiele by assuming that regnal years in Judah were counted

from 1 Nisan, and that Zedekiah’s reign began on 2 Nisan 597 b.C.

For

Galil, the eleventh year in Ezek 26:1 was then 597n – 11 = 586n. Although

the latter half of this year was after Galil’s date for the fall of Jerusalem, his

reckoning that Zedekiah’s reign started in Nisan of 597 b.C. means that the

thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin’s captivity would be 561n, not the 562n that

Babylonian records establish as the accession year of Amel-Marduk.

Galil’s

system also cannot be reconciled with Ezek 40:1 (see below).

A normal reading of the entirety of Ezekiel’s writings makes it difcult

to accept such arbitrary switching to dating by the regnal years of Zedekiah.

Ezekiel never mentions Zedekiah by name. He regarded Jehoiachin as his

rightful ruler, and even when Zedekiah was still on the throne of Judah, he

avoids measuring the years by anything to do with Zedekiah, referring the

dates instead to Jehoiachin and his captivity. The introduction to Ezekiel’s

writing sets the tone by which later references to years, months, and days are

to be understood: it was the fth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin (Ezek

1:2). We have a right to expect that any one biblical author, such as Ezekiel,

In his book The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 9,

Galil presents as the rst postulate of his chronological system the idea that Judean

regnal years started on the rst of Nisan. Galil cites no evidence in support of his

choice in this matter, although he may have derived this idea from m. Roš Haš. 1 and

b. Roš Haš. 1a, which are late sources. In contrast, Thiele (Mysterious Numbers, 51-53)

cites 1 Kgs 6:1, 37-38 and 2 Kgs 22:3; 23:23 as evidence that Judah’s regnal years began

in Tishri. As mentioned above, Galil also assumed that Nebuchadnezzar’s capture of

Jehoiachin, and his installation of Zedekiah in his place, occurred on 2 Nisan 597 b.C.

according to the presumption that the month reckoned as Adar by the Babylonians

was reckoned as Nisan by the Judeans.

Galil acknowledges this difculty for his chronology, saying that the thirty-

seventh year of Jehoiachin’s captivity in 2 Kgs 25:27 and Jer 52:31 is only approximate

(“Chronology,” 377, n. 39).

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th e Pa R i a n ma R b l e a n d ot h e R Su R P R i S e S . . .

would have been consistent throughout his writing in the way he measured

the years, instead of switching between various methods without any clue to

the reader, as maintained by scholars who support the 586 b.C. date for the

fall of Jerusalem. There is no conict, however, if Ezekiel was using Tishri

years dated from 598t and the fall of Jerusalem was in the summer of 587

b.C.

Once the correct date is accepted for that event, no such switching is

The revelation would then be in the calendar year 588t, on the rst day of either

the fth month (Ab) or the sixth month (Elul) in order to be after the fall of Jerusalem

in the fourth month of 587. The latter of these dates (1 Elul = September 18, 587 b.C.)

is to be preferred, since the city is said to be “laid waste” (hbfrfx/hf, Ezek 26:2), which

implies a time after the destructions under Nebuzaradan had been carried out (2 Kgs

25:8-10; Jer 52:12-14). The various activities related to Nebuzaradan could not have all

been done in one day. In particular, it is unreasonable to expect that as soon as he arrived

at the site he would have hastily consulted with the commanders already stationed there,

after which he and they together drew up plans, issued orders, and then moved into

the city to implement their plans for the various phases of the destruction of the city,

all on the same day of his arrival. Instead, the texts indicate that Nebuzaradan came to

Jerusalem (MIlf#f$w%ry: . . . )bf@), that is, presumably to the Babylonian camp just outside

the city, on the seventh day of the fth month (2 Kgs 25:8; see the same grammatical

construction in 2 Kgs 18:17b and Dan 1:1, where hostile forces came to Jerusalem, but

had not yet entered it). After three days of resting from the journey and consulting with

his eld commanders, he entered into the city (MIlf#f$w%ryb@i . . . )bf@) on the tenth of the

month (Jer 52:12) to carry out the plans they had formulated. A parallel can be found in

Jonah’s coming to Nineveh on one day (hwen:ynI-l)e K7ley,'wA, Jonah 3:3) and then starting

to come into the city (ry(ibf )wOblf, Jonah 3:4) on a subsequent day. Nebuzaradan's

destructions—the demolishing of houses and public buildings, the tearing down of the

city wall, and the burning of the Temple—then began on the tenth day of the fth

month (Ab). Consistent with this, Josephus (Wars, VI.4.5/250) relates that the First and

Second Temples were both burnt on the tenth of Ab. A later Jewish tradition that placed

the burning of the Temples on the ninth of Ab apparently originated with Rabbi Akiba,

whose hopes that Bar-Koseba was the Messiah were dashed when Koseba’s fortress

fell to the Romans on the ninth of Ab, a.d. 135. Rabbi Akiba applied this day and

month (ninth of Ab/Tisha B’Av) to the burning of both Temples. He or his followers

also applied the Tisha B’Av date to other disasters, including the evil report of twelve

spies in Num 13:26-33 and the Roman plowing of Jerusalem by command of Emperor

Hadrian. However, as just shown from Jeremiah and 2 Kings, the destruction of the

First Temple could not have occurred earlier than the tenth of Ab, and Josephus’s

eyewitness account of the burning of the Second Temple denitely dates that event

to the tenth of Ab. This articial “ninth of Ab” symmetry for several catastrophes has

been discussed by Yuval Shahar, who has shown by citations from Dio Cassius and by

recently discovered numismatic evidence that the rabbinic date of the ninth of Ab, a.d.

136, for the Roman plowing of Jerusalem cannot be supported historically. See Yuval

Shahar, “The Destruction of the Temple in the Understanding of Rabbi Akiba and the

Establishment of the Fasts of the Destruction,” (in Hebrew) Zion 68 (2003): 145-165.

Akiba’s date of the ninth of Ab for the destruction of both Temples, which was set to

match the month and day in a.d. 135 when his hopes in the false messiah were shattered,

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necessary and all of Ezekiel’s date-formulas will be seen to be consistent with

his counting from the capture of Jehoiachin and the installation of Zedekiah

in 598t, and also consistent with his reckoning the years according to the

conventional Tishri-based years of Judah. There are no exceptions.

A further problem to those who hold to the 586 b.C. date for the fall of

Jerusalem is presented by Ezek 40:1, which is dated to the twenty-fth year

of exile and also fourteen years after the city fell.

With Thiele’s and Galil’s

start of Jehoiachin’s exile in 597n, the twenty-fth year of exile would be

(597n – 24) = 573n, and the city’s destruction, fourteen years previous, would

be in 587n. This clearly contradicts their 586 b.C. date for Jerusalem’s fall.

Thiele’s mishandling of the chronological markers in this verse is obscured

by a trick of arithmetic whereby he subtracts the fourteen years from the

twenty-ve years to conclude that the city fell eleven years after his date for

the beginning of the captivity in 597n, and hence in 586n (using the Nisan/

Tishri notation here for clarity).

This interpretation assumes that the twenty-

ve years and the fourteen years in the verse are of the same type—either

both are accession years or both are nonaccession years. The grammar of

the verse shows they are not the same. It was the twenty-fth year “of our

captivity” (w%nt'w%lgFl;), implying nonaccession reckoning, but fourteen years

“after the city was smitten” (ry(ihf htfk@;hu r#$e)j rxa)a), implying accession

reckoning. Converting the twenty-fth year of the captivity to an accession-

type number means that the subtraction should have been 24 – 14 = 10 years

from 597n, yielding 587n instead of Thiele’s 586n. This is one more incident

that shows the need for a well-dened notation that lends itself to simple

arithmetic calculations.

Using the proper starting date of 598t or 598n for Jehoiachin’s captivity,

the twenty-fth year of exile (Ezek 40:1) was (598t – 24) = 574t or (598n –

24) = 574n. Fourteen years previous was (574t + 14) = 588t or (574n + 14)

= 588n. Neither gure is compatible with Tammuz of 586 b.C. for the fall of

Jerusalem. The rst gure (588t) is compatible with the 587 b.C. date for the

fall and the second (588n) is not, showing that Ezekiel was using Tishri-based

cannot take precedence over the testimony of the Scriptures for the earliest possible date

for the burning of the First Temple (10 Ab, 587 b.C.) or the testimony of Josephus for

the exact date of the burning of the Second (10 Ab, a.d. 70).

A study of all the scriptural texts related to the last days of the Judean monarchy

in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 2 Kings, and 2 Chronicles shows that all texts are in agreement with

the fall of Jerusalem in 587 b.C. For the demonstration that each of these four books is

internally consistent, and all are consistent with each other on the chronology of this

time, see Rodger C. Young, “When Did Jerusalem Fall?” JETS 47 (2004): 21-38.

Ezek 40:1, when properly interpreted according to the Hebrew original,

provides a rich source of chronological and theological information. See my study,

“Ezekiel 40:1 As a Corrective,” 265-283.

Mysterious Numbers, 191.

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years. Placing the fall of Jerusalem in 588t, which was in the eleventh year of

Zedekiah (2 Kgs 25:2-4; 2 Chron 36:11; Jer 52:5-6) means that his reign from

598t to 588t was ten complete years, so that the eleven years given to him in

these texts are calculated by nonaccession reckoning.

Leslie McFall, another advocate of the 586 b.C. date, correctly interpreted

the twenty-ve years as by nonaccession reckoning, signifying that a full

twenty-four years had passed, but he maintained that the phrase “after the

city was smitten” (ry(ihf htfk@;hu r#$e)j rxa)a) in this verse must also be

interpreted in a nonaccession or inclusive numbering sense. For McFall, then,

Ezekiel’s vision was thirteen years after the fall of the city, not fourteen years

after.

This contradicts the meaning of the preposition rxa)a provided in

Hebrew lexicons, where its denition, when used in a temporal sense, is given

as identical to the English “after.” McFall is unable to provide any usage from

the Hebrew Bible to support his rendering (fourteenth year of the fall of the

city), relying instead on the fact that rxa)a in Ezek 40:1 is translated in the

LXX by meta, and this Greek word is used in an inclusive-numbering sense in

places like Matt 27:63.

Extreme interpretations like this are not necessary. A proper reading of

all the chronological texts in Ezekiel shows their internal consistency, once

a priori assumptions are abandoned in favor of letting the texts themselves

demonstrate the chronological method of their author. Interpretations

that demonstrate internal consistency should be given preference over

interpretations that require the assumption of inconsistencies for a single

author, especially if the inconsistency-producing systems require the kinds

of strained exegesis demonstrated by advocates of the 586 b.C. date for the

fall of Jerusalem.

In a certain sense, however, there will always be inconsistencies in

the historical records regarding how the years of the kings of Israel and

Judah were measured. These inconsistencies do not have their origin in

the authors of Scripture, who had faithfully copied, apparently from court

records,

the years of their kings. The inconsistencies come instead from

the kings themselves, who ultimately were the source for determining how

their years of reign were to be recorded. That Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the

authors of the closing chapters of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles all counted

Zedekiah’s reign by nonaccession reckoning is explained quite simply by

one postulate: that is how Zedekiah ordered it to be done. The switching of

the mode of reckoning for Zedekiah’s years had a precedent in the switching

in the middle of the ninth century b.C. Coucke and Thiele both recognized,

Leslie McFall, “Do the Sixty-nine Weeks of Daniel Date the Messianic Mission

of Nehemiah or Jesus?” JETS 52 (2009): 695, n. 58.

Rodger C. Young, “Tables of Reign Lengths from the Hebrew Court Recorders,”

JETS 48 (2005): 225-248.

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independently, the change at this time, and both gave the same reason for

the change: it was a time of rapprochement and intermarriage between

the two kingdoms. No such reason is immediately apparent to explain why

Zedekiah used nonaccession reckoning for his reign. Although we cannot

determine why this was done, it can be stated with certainty that it was done.

Any chronology that does not recognize nonaccession years for Zedekiah

will fall into serious internal contradictions, some of which were described

in the foregoing discussion.

A demonstration of the arbitrariness of the king’s choice in the question

of accession or nonaccession years comes from the records of the kings

of Assyria. For Assyrian kings, accession reckoning, with a calendar year

starting in Nisan, was the rule. Yet Assyriologists do not seem to object to

Hayim Tadmor’s statement that Tiglath-Pileser III went against the general

convention of his predecessors and counted his years in a nonaccession

sense.

That Tadmor is right in this matter is established by a comparison

of the events given in Tiglath-Pileser’s inscriptions, and dated to his regnal

years, with the same events as listed in chronological order in the Assyrian

Eponym Canon. This method of comparing a king’s inscriptions with

inscriptions from other sources is what should also determine the matter

for the chronology of the last kings of Judah. If this procedure shows that

Zedekiah did not follow the accession reckoning of the majority of his

predecessors on the throne of Judah that should be sufcient to establish

the matter. It is of no consequence that neither Tiglath-Pileser nor Zedekiah

has left any record justifying their actions. They were kings, and they were

under no obligation to explain these things to their court recorders, or to

us.

Having come this far with Coucke, we must leave him, because after

establishing the date of the fall of Jerusalem by sound historical and exegetical

methods, he makes the unsupportable and unreasonable assumption that

the years of Jehoiachin’s exile were by accession reckoning, leading to a date

for the beginning of the captivity and the rst year of Zedekiah that is one

year too early (599t). If the Babylonian Chronicle that gave the date when

Jehoiachin was captured had been available to him, we could hope that he

would have seen the error of this assumption and would have recognized

that this new evidence requires that the eleven years of Zedekiah’s reign are

to be understood in a nonaccession sense. As it is, we can thank Professor

Coucke for demonstrating that the use of chronological texts in Ezekiel,

as tied to xed Babylonian dates, is a proper way of dating the last year

of the Judean monarchy, even if his assumption about accession years for

Hayim Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III, King of Assyria (Jerusalem:

Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994), 232, n. 3.

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Jehoiachin’s captivity and Zedekiah’s reign led him astray in determining

when these monarchs started their reigns.

Conclusion

At the time of writing of the present article, considerable attention was being

given in the international news to the announcement of Eliat Mazar that

she and her fellow archaeologists had uncovered a wall in Jerusalem that was

believed to date from the time of Solomon. If the nding of a wall dating

from Solomon’s time has caused such a stir, what would be the reaction in the

press and in the scholarly community if the continued excavations in Jerusalem

unearth an inscription from this time, and even one that has Solomon’s name

on it? Judging from the interest shown in the Tel Dan inscription that names

“the house of David” and the controversy over the reading of the Khirbet

Qeiyafa ostracon, there would be quite intense interest in the discovery and

the consequent interpretation of what this meant for the historicity of the

books of Kings and Chronicles. What is ironic in all this is that we already

have writings that come from the time of Solomon and before, and which

name not only Solomon, but many other individuals as well. The work of

Coucke, Liver, Cross, and Barnes has demonstrated that the Tyrian King List

has every indication of being historical, and it names not only Solomon, but

also a series of Tyrian kings from the time of Abibalus, father of Hiram, in

about 1000 b.C., to Pygmalion, who died in the early eighth century b.C.

means of literary analysis, F. C. Movers and Katzenstein

concluded that

the passages in Josephus citing the records of Tyre strongly imply that these

are actual translations of those records and not the invention of Josephus.

To this must be added what might be called a mathematical demonstration

Coucke’s wrong assumptions in this matter do not affect the accuracy of his

dates when measuring backward from the thirty-seventh year of captivity to the

twenty-fth year of exile (Ezek 40:1) or to the twelfth year (Ezek 33:21), since the

elapsed time is twelve years in the rst case and twenty-ve years in the second case

for both accession and nonaccession reckoning. The two methods, however, differ in

when they date the start of the captivity: 598t for nonaccession reckoning (the correct

date) or 599t for accession reckoning.

If Hiram of Tyre was in his twelfth year of reign (Ag. Ap. I.18/126) in the year

that construction started on Solomon’s Temple, 968t, then his thirty-four-year reign

(Ag. Ap. I.18/117) began in 980t and ended in 946t. The years of reign of his father

Abibalus are not given, so we can estimate that he started his reign about 1000 b.C.

The Tyrian King List (Ag. Ap. I.18/125) relates that Pygmalion ruled for forty-seven

years, and his sister ed from Tyre in his seventh year (825 b.C.), so that Pygmalion’s

reign was from 832 to 785 b.C. Coucke (Chronologie, 328, n. 3) says that the gures of

the Tyrian King List show that Tyre was using accession reckoning for its kings.

F. C. Movers, Die Phönizier (Bonn-Berlin: E. Weber, 1841-1856) 2/1:190 n. 4,

cited in, and expanded on, by Katzenstein, History of Tyre, 79-80.

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of their authenticity, because if these records were not both authentic

and accurate, then the proper date for the beginning of construction of

Solomon’s Temple could never have been derived from them, as was done in

the work of the scholars who have studied their chronological data. To this

rather amazing demonstration of the authenticity of the Tyrian King List,

we can add, thanks to Coucke, one other item from the archives of Tyre: the

statement that construction began on Solomon’s Temple 240 years after Tyre

was (re)founded. As has been shown, this statement is in agreement with

modern scholarship that relates this event to the dislocations caused by the

Sea Peoples in the reign of Merneptah.

The Tyrian King List gives the names of twelve kings of Tyre over a

span of two centuries, and although there are some textual problems related

to the spelling of the various names and sometimes to their individual lengths

of reign, the total number of years is well established. For the same period

of time (Abibalus in about 1000 b.C. to the death of Pygmalion in 785 b.C.),

the Scriptures name twelve monarchs who sat on the throne of Judah (David

through the beginning of the Amaziah/Uzziah coregency) and seventeen who

sat on the throne of Israel (Jeroboam I through Jeroboam II). In contrast to

the Tyrian King List, there are no real problems in the forms of the names of

the monarchs, nor in the gures for their lengths of reign as given in the MT.

More importantly, the many reign-length gures and synchronisms given for

these twenty-nine monarchs have allowed the construction of a coherent and

precise chronology for the entire period by those scholars who have followed

the basic chronological principles laid down by Coucke and Thiele, with

only the slight modications to their systems that have been discussed in the

present article. There are more that seventy items of a precise nature (reign

lengths and synchronisms) for these twenty-nine monarchs given in Kings

and Chronicles. For someone trained as a systems analyst, it is remarkable—

indeed surprising—that all seventy-plus of these statistics t together into

a system of chronology that has shown itself accurate by correlation with

well-established dates in Assyrian history, with no emendation required for

any of the texts. For chronological schemes that are not built on the general

principles laid down by Coucke and Thiele, no such claim can be made. These

schemes all require that the texts must be declared in error at various points

because they do not conform to the modern scholar’s theories. Such scholars

sometimes complain that Thiele’s theories are “articial” or “too complicated,”

even though Thiele, and Coucke before him, were careful to document each

There are problems, however, in the LXX variants for some of these lengths of

reign. The superiority of the MT in its chronological data for the kingdom period is

argued extensively by Thiele in Mysterious Numbers, especially in the rst edition, as well

as in his original publication in JNES (“Kings of Judah and Israel”). No one has been

able to construct a coherent chronology of the kingdom period that uses the variant

readings of the LXX.

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of the tenets underlying their systems as based on known practices in the

ancient Near East. Thanks to the work of Coucke, we can now add to the

“surprising success”

of the system built on Thiele’s principles the success of

the resultant chronology in matching data not only from Assyrian history, but

also from selected data in the history of the classical Mediterranean world.

This includes the records for the kings of Tyre as preserved in the writings of

Josephus, and the connection between the date of construction of Solomon’s

Temple, as given in Scripture, with the dates of the Trojan War given in the

Parian Marble.

Barnes, 137, refers to the methodology of Thiele and its “surprising success in

accounting for nearly all of the biblical chronological data,” but then complains about

“its resultant violence to the Dtr editing of those data.”